American Scoundrel

'A great piece of storytelling' Guardian

A fascinating book- informative and entertaining

Keneally has a novelist's sense of pace, a mellifluous prose style and a profound sympathy for his characters

This has a thriller-ish propulsion-a highly readable book

Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize with Schindler's Ark which was subsequently made into the internationally acclaimed film Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg. His non-fiction includes an entertaining book on the American Civil War, American Scoundrel, and a superb epic about the Iirhs diaspora, The Great Shame.

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Washington's Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This is the story of that killing and its repercussions. Charming and ambitious, Dan Sickles literally got away with murder. His protector was none other than the President himself, James Buchanan; his political friends quickly gathered around; and Sickles was acquitted. His trial is described with all Thomas Keneally's powers of dash and drama, against a backdrop of double-dealing, intrigue and slavery. Enslaved, in her turn, by the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century society, his wife was shunned and thereafter banned from public life. Sickles, meanwhile, was free to accept favours and patronage. He raised a regiment for the Union, and went on to become a general in the army, rising to the rank of brigadier-general and commanding a flak at the Battle of Gettysburg - at which he lost a leg, which he put into the military museum in Washington where he would take friends to visit it. Thomas Keneally brilliantly recreates an extraordinary period, when women were punished for violating codes of society that did not bind men. And the caddish, good-looking Dan Sickles personifies the extremes of the era: as a womaniser, he introduced his favourite madam to Queen Victoria while his wife stayed at home, and he installed his housekeeper as his mistress while his second wife took up residence nearby. American Scoundrel is the lens through which the reader can view history at a time when America was being torn apart.

The Great Shame

Keneally's history of Irish emigration is a lucid, elegant and ambitious book with an epic narrative sweep

Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler's Ark, since made into the internationally acclaimed film Schindler's List by Steven Speilberg. His works of non-fiction include The Place Where Souls Are Born, about the American South West, his memoir Homebush Boy, and, most recently, The Commonwealth of Thieves. His twenty-three works of fiction include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest and Confederates, each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Thomas Keneally is married with two daughters and lives most of the year in Sydney.

In the 19th century the Irish population was halved. This masterly book traces the three causes of this depletion; first the manine, second the Irish diaspora and the emigrations to places such as America and Canada and thridly the transportations of political activists to Australia. It is a quest for Keneally's Irish ancestors. Based on unique research among little-used sources, the characters and their stories come brilliantly to life; this is an important book in which the main political themes are fascinatingly explored. It also contains a remarkable collection of photographs and documents.

Thomas Keneally

Australia is lucky to have Keneally. Few writers have a public voice that one wants to take to the bedroom... He gets down and dirty with his characters form their perspective at the time... complex moderate and humane... likely to endure

Evocative, broad-ranging and intelligently observed

Keneally has deployed his outstanding talents as a narrative writer to produce an enlivening, informative and judicious book about his country's troubled origins

Keneally has always had a grand talent for the telling of a tale. His rattling account of the genesis of his native city is one of his very best

The Commonwealth of Thieves is immaculately researched and historically exact... a great read and a useful scholarly resource....an account of an extraordinary event described with gusto and sympathy

[A] beautifully written account of the foundation of New South Wales, complete with disastrous attitudes towards the "Indians" and a horrific account of the convicts' sea-crossing

Elegantly written and solidly researched narrative... this is a fascinating study of a unique social experiment

Keneally uses his novelist's skill to construct a lively mosaic from contemporary accounts of what today seems an utterly barbaric process

Tom Keneally's book offers an engaging treatment of a subject which over the years has provoked a long and sometimes heated debate

The Story of the Founding of Australia

The story of modern Australia begins in eighteenth-century Britain, where people were hanged for petty offences but crime was rife, and the gaols were bursting. From this situation was born the Sydney experiment, with criminals perceived to be damaging British society transported to Sydney, an 'open air prison with walls 14,000 miles thick'. 
 
Eleven ships were dispatched in 1781, and arrived in Australia after eight hellish months at sea. Tom Keneally describes the first four years of the 'thief colony' and how, despite the escapes, the floggings, the murders and the rebellions, it survived against the odds to create a culture which would never have been tolerated in its homeland but which, in Australia, became part of the identity of a new and audacious nation. 
 
By the author of Schindler's Ark, since made into the internationally acclaimed film, Schindler's List.

Thomas Keneally

Praise for The Commonwealth of Thieves

Australia is lucky to have Keneally. Few writers have a public voice that one wants to take to the bedroom... He gets down and dirty with his characters form their perspective at the time... complex moderate and hum ...

Evocative, broad-ranging and intelligently observed

Keneally has deployed his outstanding talents as a narrative writer to produce an enlivening, informative and judicious book about his country's troubled origins

Australia is lucky to have Keneally. Few writers have a public voice that one wants to take to the bedroom... He gets down and dirty with his characters form their perspective at the time... complex moderate and hum ...

Evocative, broad-ranging and intelligently observed

Keneally has deployed his outstanding talents as a narrative writer to produce an enlivening, informative and judicious book about his country's troubled origins

Australia is lucky to have Keneally. Few writers have a public voice that one wants to take to the bedroom... He gets down and dirty with his characters form their perspective at the time... complex moderate and hum ...

Evocative, broad-ranging and intelligently observed

Keneally has deployed his outstanding talents as a narrative writer to produce an enlivening, informative and judicious book about his country's troubled origins

Books by Thomas Keneally

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